E 
766 




isoo 



("lass _ ^ >' ^^ 
Book . 'jLUJlI 



ADDRESS 



OF 



PRESIDENT WILSON 



BEFORE 



THE GRAIN DEALERS' 
ASSOCIATION 



AT BALTIMORE, MD. 
SEPTEMBER 25, 1916 




WASHINGTON 
1916 



. 00 ^'^r 




D.' of DT 

o:t - 1918 



ADDRESS OF PRESIDEiM WILSON BEFORE THE GRAIN 
DEALERS' ASSOCIATION. 



• 

Mr. Chairman, Gentlemen of the Association, Ladies and Gen- 
tlemen : 

It is a matter of sincere gratification to me that I can come and 
address an association of this sort, and yet I feel that there is a 
certain drawback to the present occasion. That drawback consists 
of the fact that it occurs in the midst of a political campaign. Noth- 
ing so seriously interrupts or interferes with the sober and sincere 
consideration of public questions as a political campaign. I want 
to say to you at the outset that I believe in -party action, but that 
I have a supreme contempt for partisan action; that I believe that 
it is necessary for men to concert measures together in organized 
cooperation by party, but that vshenever party feeling touches any 
one of the passions that work against the general interest, it is alto- 
gether to be condemned. Therefore, I feel that on occasions like this 
we should divest ourselves of the consciousness that we are in the 
midst of a political campaign, because associations like this are not 
gathered together to take part in partisan discussion, but to consider 
those permanent interests of the Nation which concern us all the 
time, which do not alter their aspects because parties are contesting 
for power; and that we ought as much as possible on all occasions 
to think of ourselves as first of all men devoted to the welfare of the 
country and as compared with that devoted to nothing else whatever. 

Wliat I have come to say to you torday, therefore, I would wish to say 
in an atmosphere from which all the vapors of passions have been 
cleared away, for I want to speak to you about the business situation 
of the world, so far as America is concerned. I am not going to take 
the liberty of discussing that business situation from the special 
point of view of your association, because I know that I would be 
bringing coals to Newcastle. I know that I am speaking to men 
who understand the relation of the grain business to the business of 
the world very much bettei- than I do: and I know that it is true that, 
except under ver}^ unusual circumstances such as have existed in the 
immediate past, the export of grain from this country has been 
a diminishing part of our foreign commerce rather than an increas- 
ing part; that the increase of our own population, — the decrease in 
proportion to that increase, of our production of grains, — has been 

63644—16 3 



rendering the question of foreign markets less important, though 
still very important, than it was in past generations, so far as the 
dealing in grain is concerned. I also remember, however, that we 
have only begun in this country the process bj' which the full pro- 
duction of our agricultural acreage is to be obtained. The agricul- 
tural acreage of this country ought to produce twice what it is now 
producing, and under the stimulation and instruction which have 
recently been characteristic of agricultural development I think we 
can confidently predict that within, let us say. a couple of decades 
the agricultural production of this country will be something like 
double, whereas, there is no likelihood that the population of this 
country will be doubled within the same period. You cm look 
forward, therefore, it seems to me, with some degree of confidence to 
an increasing, and perhaps a rapidly increasing, volume of the 
products in which you deal. 

But. as I have said. I have not come to discuss that. I have come 
to discuss the general relation of the United States to the business of 
the world in the decades innnediately ahead of us. We have swung 
out. my fellow citizens, into a new business era in America. I 
suppose that there is no man connected with your association who 
does not remember the time when the whole emi)hasis of American 
business discussion was laid upon the domestic market. I need not 
remind you how recently it has happened that our attention has 
been extended to the markets of the workl ; much less recently, 1 
need not say. in the matters with which you are concerned than in 
the other export interests of the country. But it happened that 
American production, not only in the agricultural field and in 
mining and in all the natural products of the earth, but also in 
manufacture, increased in recent years to such a volume that Ameri- 
can business burst its jacket. It could not any longer be taken care 
of within the field of the domestic markets; and when that began 
to disclose itself as the situation, we also became aware that Ameri- 
can l)Usiness men had not studied foreign markets, that they did not 
know the commerce of the world, and that they did not have the 
ships in which to take their proportionate part in the carrying trade 
of the world ; that our merchant marine had sunk to a negligible 
amount, and that it had sunk to its lowest at the very time when the 
ti<le of our exports began to grow in most formidable volume. 

One of the most interesting circumstances of our business history 
is this: The banking laws of the United States, — I mean the Federal 
banking laws. — did not put the national banks in a position to do 
foreign exchange under favorable conditions, and it was actually 
true that private banks, and sometimes branch banks drawn out of 
other countries, notably out of Canada, were established at our chief 



ports to do what American bankers ought to have done. It was as 
if America was not only unaccustomed to touching all the nerves 
of the world's business, but was disinclined to touch them, and had 
not prepared the instrumentality by which it might take part in 
the great commerce of the round globe. Only in verj' recent years 
have we been even studying the problem of providing ourselves 
with the instrumentalities. Xot until the recent legislation of Con- 
gress known as the Federal reserve act were the Federal banks of 
this country given the proper ecjuipment through which they could 
assist American commerce, not only in our own country, but in any 
part of the world where they chose to set up branch institutions. 
British banks had been serving British merchants all over the world, 
German banks had been serving German merchants all over the 
world, and no national bank of the United States had been serving 
American merchants anywhere in the world except in the United 
States. We had, as it were, deliberately refrained from playing 
our iDart in the field in which we prided ourselves that we were most 
ambitious and most expert, the field of manufacture and of com- 
merce. All that is past, and the" scene has been changed by the events 
of the last two years, almost suddenly, and with a completeness that 
almost daunts the planning mind. Xot only when this war is over, 
but now, America has her place in the world and must take her place 
in the world of finance and commerce upon a scale that she never 
dreamed of before. 

My dream is that she will take her place in that great field in a 
new spirit which the world has never seen before; not the spirit of 
those who would exclude others, but the spirit of those who would 
excel others. I want to see America pitted against the world, not in 
selfishness, but in brains. The first thing that brains have to feed 
upon is knowledge, and when I hear men proposing to deal with the 
business problems of the United States in the future as we dealt 
with them in the past, I do not have to inquire any further whether 
they are equipped with knowledge. I dismiss them from the reck- 
oning, because I know that the facts are going to dominate and they 
know nothing about the facts. And the most that we can supply 
ourselves with just now is, not the detailed program of policy, but 
the instrumentalities of gaining thorough knowledge of what we 
are about. Every man of us must for some time to come be " from 
Missouri ! " We must want to know what the facts are, and when 
we know what the facts are we shall know what the policy ought 
to be. 

What instrumentalities have we provided ourselves with in order 
that we may be equipped with knowledge? There has been an 
instrumentality in operation for four or five years of which, strangely 
enough, American business men have only slowly become aware. 



Some four or five years ao;o the Congress established, in connection 
with the department which was then the Department of Commerce 
and Labor (now the Department of Commerce), a Bureau of Foreign 
and Domestic Connnerce. and one of the advantages which the 
American (lovernment has derived from that bureau is that it has 
been able to hire brains for much less than the brains were worth. 
It is in a way a national discredit to us, my fellow citizens, that we 
are paying studious men, capjible of understanding anything and 
of conducting any business, just about one-third of Avhat they could 
conmiand in the field of business; and it is one of the admirable cir- 
cumstances of American life that they are proud to serve the Gov- 
ernment on a pittance. There are snch men in the Bureau of 
Foreign and Domestic Commerce. They have been studying the 
foreign connnerce of this countr}' as it was never studied before, and 
have been making reports so comprehensive and so thorough that 
they compare to their great advantage with the reports of any simi- 
lar bureau of any other government in the world, and I have found 
to my amazement that some of the best of those reports seem never 
to iiave been read. All j'ou have to do in order to find out the 
details of some of the greatest fields of activity in the world in the 
matter of business is to resort to the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic 
Connnerce; but there again the phenomena that I have been speaking 
of iiaye displayed themselves in a very renuirkable w'ay. It needed 
the catastrophe and the tragedy of this Avar to awaken American 
business men to the fact that these were the things wdiich they must 
know and know at once. 

And then, in addition to that, there was recently created the 
Federal Trade Commission. It is hard to describe the functions 
of tliat commission; all I can say is that it has transformed the 
Government ol" tiie Fnited States from being an antagonist of busi- 
ness int<» being a friend of business. A few years ago American 
busines- men. — I think you will corroborate this statement. — took 
up their moruini: papci- witli some degree of nervousness to see 
what the ( Jovcrniiicnt was (h>ing to them. I ask you if you take 
u|) the luidning paper now with any degi'ee of nervousness? And 
I a^lv you if you \\:\vv not foiuid. those of you who have dealt with 
it all, the i'^etU'ral Trade Commissicm to be put there to show you 
the way in uhidi tlie Go\ernment can help you and not the way in 
which the (io\crnment can hinder you? 

But tliat i- not the matter that I am most interested in. It has 
always been a fiction. — I don't know who invented it or why he 
invente*! it. — thnt there was a contest between the law and business. 
There has always been a contest in every government between the 
law and bad business, and I do not want to see that contest softened 
in anv wav: but there has never been aiiv contest between men who 



intended the right thing and the men who administered the law. 
But what I want to speak about is this : One of the functions of the 
Federal Trade Commission is to inquire with the fullest powers ever 
conferred upon a similar commission in this country into all the 
circumstances of American business for the purpose of doing for 
American business exactly what the Department of Agriculture has 
so long and w^ith increasing efficiency done for the farmer, inform 
the American business man of every element, big and little, with 
which it is his duty to deal. Here are created searching eyes of 
inquiry to do the very thing that it was imperatively necessary and 
immediately necessary that the country should do, — look upon the 
field of business and know what was going on ! 

And then, in the third place, you know that we have just now done 
what it was common sense to do about the tariff. We have not put 
this into words, but I do not hesitate to put it into words : We have 
admitted that on the one side and on the other we were talking the- 
ories and managing policies without a sufficient knowledge of the 
facts upon which we were acting, and. therefore, we have established 
what is intended to be a nonpartisan tariff commission to study the 
conditions with which legislation has to deal in the matter of the 
relations of American with foreign business transactions. Another 
eye created to see the facts ! And I am hopeful that I can find the 
men who will see the facts and state them, no matter whose opinion 
those facts contradict. For an opinion ought always to have a pro- 
found respect for a fact; and when you once get the facts, opinions 
that are antagonistic to those facts are necessarily defeated. I have 
never found a really courageous man who was afraid to put his 
opinion to the test of facts, or a morally sincere man who was not 
ready to surrender to the facts when they were contrary to his opin- 
ion. The Tariff Commission is' going to look for the facts no matter 
who is hurt. We are creating one after another the instrumentalities 
of knowledge, so that the business men of this country shall know 
what the field of the world's business is and deal with that field upon 
that knowledge. 

Then, when the knowledge is obtained, what are we going to do? 
One of the things that interests me most about an association of this 
sort is that the intention of it is that the members should share a com- 
mon body of information, and that they should concert among them- 
selves those operations of business which are beneficial to all of them ; 
that, instead of a large number of dealers in grain acting separately 
and each fighting for his own hand, you are willing to come together 
and study the problem as if you were partners and brothers and co- 
operators in this field of business. That has been going on in every 
occupation in the United States of any consequence. Even the men 
that do the advertising have been getting together, and they have 



made this startling and fundamental discovery, that the only way to 
advertise successfully is to tell the truth. There are many reasons 
for that. One of the chief reasons is that when you get found out, it 
is worse for you than it was before ; but the great reason, the sober 
reason, is that business must be founded on the truth, and you men 
get together in order to create a clearing house for the truth about 
your business. 

Very well; that is a picture in small of what we must do in the 
large. We must cooperate in the whole field of business, the Gov- 
ernment with the merchant, the merchant with his employee, the 
whole body of producers with the whole body of consumers, to see 
that the right things are produced in the right volume and find the 
right purchasers at the right place, and that, all working together, we 
realize that nothing can be for the individual benefit which is not 
for the common benefit. 

You know that there was introduced in the House of Kepresenta- 
tives recently, a bill, commonly called the Webb bill, for the purpose 
of stating it as the policy of the law of the United States that noth- 
ing in the antitrust laws now existing should be interpreted to inter- 
fere with the proper sort of cooperation among exporters. The 
foreign field is not like the domestic field. The foreign field is full 
of combinations meant to be exclusive. The antitrust laws of the 
United States are intended to prevent any kind of combination in. 
the United States which shall be exclusive of new enterprises within 
the United States, any combination which shall set up monopoly in 
America ; but the export business is a very big business, a very com- 
plicated business, a very expensive business, and it ought to be possi- 
ble, and it will be possible and legal, for men engaged in exporting 
to get together and manage it in groups, so that they can manage it 
at an advantage instead of at a disadvantage as compared with foreign 
rivals. Not for the purpose of exclusive and monopolistic combina- 
tion, but for the purpose of cooperation, and there is a very wide 
difference there. I for myself despise monopoly, and I have an en- 
thusiasm for cooperation. By cooperation I mean working along 
with anybody who is willing to work along with you under definite 
understandings and arrangements which will constitute a sound 
business program. There can be no jealousy of that, and if there 
had been time, I can say with confidence that this bill, which passed 
the House of Kepresentatives, would have passed the Senate of the 
United States also. So that any obstacle that ingenious lawyers may 
find in the antitrust laws will be removed. I was a lawyer once 
myself before I reformed; I can divide a hair 'twdxt north and 
northeast side, but I do not think it is worth while, and I do not 
think that statutes are the places for ingenuity. A statute is intended 
to lay down a broad and comprehensive and national policy, and it 



ought to be read in that light. But there would be no fun in punctua- 
tion if you had to read it that way ! The purpose of legislation in 
the immediate future in this country is going to be to remove all 
ingenious constructions and make it perfectly clear what the liberties 
as well as the restraints of trade are in this country. 

And then there must be cooperation, not only between the Govern- 
ment and the business men, but between business men. Shippers must 
cooperate, and they ought to be studying right now how to cooperate. 
There are a great many gentlemen in other countries who can show 
them how ! They ought to look forward, particularly, to caring for 
this matter, that they have vehicles in which to carry their goods. 
We must address ourselves innuediately and as rapidly as possible 
to the re-creation of a great American merchant marine. Our present 
situation is very like this: Suppose that a man who had a great 
department store did not have any delivery wagons and depended 
upon his competitors in the same market to deliver his goods to 
his customers. You know what would happen. They would deliver 
tlieir own gcmds first and quickest, and they would deliver yours 
only if yours were to be delivered upon the routes followed b}' their 
wagons. That is an exact picture of what is taking place in our 
foreign trade at this minute. Foreign vessels carry our goods wdiere 
they, the foreign vessels, happen to be going, and they carry them 
only if they have room in addition to what they are carrying for 
other people. You can not conduct trade that way. That is con- 
ducting trade on sufferance. That is conducting trade on an " if 
you please." That is conducting trade on the basis of service the 
point of view of which is not your advantage. Therefore, we can 
not lose any time in getting delivery wagons. 

There has been a good deal of discussion about this recently, and 
it has been said, " The Government must not take any direct part in 
this. You must let private capital do it," and the reply was, "All 
right, go ahead." '"Oh, but we will not go ahead unless you help 
lis." We said, " Very well, then, we will go ahead, but we will not 
need yoiu- hel}). because we do not Avant to compete where you are 
already doing the carrying business, but where you are not doing the 
carrying business and it has to be done for some time at a loss. We 
will undertake to do it at a loss until that route is established, and we 
will give place to private capital whenever private capital is ready 
to take the place." That sounds like a very reasonable proposition. 
" We will carry your goods one way when we have to come back 
empty the other way and lose money on the voyage, and when there 
are cargoes both ways and it is profitable to carry them, we shall 
not insist upon carrying them any longer." 

And it is absolutely necessary now to make good our new connec- 
tions. Our new connections are with the great and rich Republics 



10 

to the vuuth of us. For the first time in 1113' recollection they are 
beorinning to trust and believe in us and want us, and one of my 
chief concerns has been to see that nothing was done that did not 
show friendship and good faith on our part. You know that is 
used to be the case that if you wanted to travel comfortably in your 
own person from New York to a South American port, you had to 
go by way of P^ngland or else stow yourself away in some uncom- 
fortable fashion in a ship that took almost as long to go straight, 
and within whose bowels you got in such a temper before you got 
there tliat you did not care whether she got there or not. The great 
interesting geographical fact to me is that by the opening of the 
Panama Canal there is a straight line south from NeAv York through 
the canal to the western coast of South America, which hitherto has 
been one of the most remote coasts in the world so far as we were 
concerned. The west coast of South America is now nearer to us 
than the eastern cost of South America ever was, though we have 
the open Atlantic upon which to approach the east coast. Here is 
the loom all ready upon which to spread the threads which can be 
worked into a fabric of friendship and wealth such as we have 
never known before ! 

The real wealth of foreigTi relationships, my fellow-citizens, 
whether they be the relationships of trade or any other kind of 
intercourse, the real wealth of those relationships is the wealth of 
mutual confidence and understanding. If we do not understand 
them and they do not understand us, we can not trade with them, 
much less be their friends, and it is only by weaving these intimate 
threads of connection that we shall be able to establish that funda- 
mental thing, that psychological, spiritual nexus which is, after all, 
the real warp and woof of trade itself. We have got to have the 
knowledge, we have got to have the cooperation, and then back of 
all that has got to lie what America has in abundance and only has 
to release, that is to say. the self-reliant enterprise. 

There is only one thing I have ever been ashamed of about in 
America, and that was the timidity and fearfulnesss of Americans 
in the presence of foreign competitors. I have dwelt among Ameri- 
cans all my life and am an intense absorbent of the atmosphere of 
America, and I know by personal experience that there are as effec- 
tive brains in America as anywhere in the world. An American 
afraid to pit American business men against any competitors any- 
where ! Enterprise, the shrewdness which Americans have shown, 
the knowledge of business which they have shown, all these things 
are going to make for that peaceful and honorable conquest of 
foreign markets which is our reasonable ambition, 

I spoke a moment ago of the Federal Trade Commission. In 
conference with various business associations, members of that com- 



11 

mission have made this astonishing discovery, that in some fields of 
manufacture at any rate, not 10 per cent of the producers of America 
keep accurate cost accounts. They do not know how much each part 
of their operation costs them. They have not analyzed their busi- 
ness in such a way as to know where economy can be substituted for 
waste, or where efficiency can take the place of inefficiency, and one 
of the things that is going to happen, now that we are going to be up 
against the expert cost accountants of the world, is that we are going 
to become first-class economists, and that American labor, already 
distinguished for its efficiency, is going to double and treble that 
efficiency. When that takes place and this great stimulating air of 
the world's competitive brains has wrought its effects upon us, we 
are going to be, I hope, what the world has never seen yet, a body 
of men who do not want to prevail by the backing of their Govern- 
ment but by the backing of their skill and knowledge. 

A friend of mine was once invited to attend a peace meeting. He 
said he would come with pleasure if he might be permitted to ex- 
plain that most of the men sitting on the platform were engaged in 
fomenting war, arid when he was aeked to explain this pleasing 
meaning, he said, " I have looked over the list of the men who con- 
stitute your executive committee and almost every one of them is 
engaged in doing things to excite the hostility and disturb the na- 
tional feeling of men in foreign countries, particularly in the Orient, 
which will inevitably lead to war sooner or later." The competitions 
of the modern world that are lasting are not the competitions of 
physical force. They are the competitions of intellectual force. The 
competitions of business either lay the foundations of respect and 
mutual confidence or the foundations of suspicion and mutual hos- 
tility. 

America has stood in the years past for that sort of political under- 
standing among men which would let every man feel that his rights 
were the same as those of another and as good as those of another, 
and the mission of America in the field of the world's commerce is 
to be the same, that when an American comes into that competition 
he comes without any arms that would enable him to conquer by 
force, but only with those peaceful influences of intelligence, a de- 
sire to serve, a knowledge of what he is about, before which every- 
thing softens and yields and renders itself subject. That is the 
mission of America, and my interest, so far as my small part in 
American affairs is concerned, is to lend every bit of intelligence I 
have to this interesting, this vital, this all-important matter of 
releasing the intelligence of America for the service of mankind. 

o 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

'III nil III 



013 900 864 9 




